What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret...

Web Site: http://www.cabaret-54.com

December 17, 1999:

Today, I've gone to see the show in Studio 54. For Tuesdays through Thursdays, day-of-performance tickets are available (mezzaine seats) for $25.

The show, as it works in the Studio 54 environment, has more life into it, more "realness" to the decadent and raw feelings to match the Kit Kat Girls and Boys. The Emcee (Michael Hall), though he doesn't look the part of a weird-ass silly "narrator" of a guy with his build (unlike Alan Cumming in the first year of this revival and Joel Grey from the movie), has the voice and has the attitude that fits the stage. The "Toast of Mayfair" Sally Bowles, (played by Susan Egan) is a very lively girl but to the expense of American Clifford Bradshaw (Michael Hayden) in the end of 1932 to 1933's Berlin, the Weimar Republic.

The first act of the show goes to the meeting with Clifford and Ernst Ludwig (Martin Moran) through the emotions of Bowles in love with Mr. Bradshaw, to the love between Herr Schultz (Dick LaTessa) and Fraulein Schneider (Carole Shelley). Mr. Hall's performance with the song "Money" with the Kit Kat Girls is one piece I loved.

However, the second act has more of a jarring effect like the sound of a window broken with a brick (which the emcee drops between the older lovers as a sign, a piece of the social wall which leads to the intending breakup between them). The second act becomes the anticlimax with Ms. Egan singing "Cabaret" as though her character is having a nervous breakdown, crying her guts out, and throwing the microphone stand to the floor with fury.

In her one-woman cabaret act, Ute Lemper quoted from Kurt Weill that musicals were too narcotic to the masses. Well, this rendition (obviously being a musical) is definitely not narcotic. After all, the real-life Weill had to leave at the same time as with the fictional Bradshaw.